On Mon, 11 Nov 2002 17:43:01 +0000, Dave Whipp wrote: > I see where you are coming from ... but is the IO infrastructure really the > most primitive thing to rely on? It may be at the moment; but I expect > that it will become more complex. C<print> may be a built-in right now; > but it should probably move to a module later. > If we can't rely on C<assert(0)> to kill a test (and C<assert(1) not to>; > then things are pretty badly broken (assuming that C<assert> exists).
It's more than just C<assert()>, though, because it includes function calls, argument passing, and boolean context. That's why we don't use Test.pm or Test::More for t/op/* in Perl 5. As far as possible, we test units in isolation. > If we are going to pick a very small subset on which almost all tests > will depend ... isn't it better to pick the test-infrastructure itself to be > that dependency; rather that some arbitrary module (like IO). Provided Parrot is tested appropriately, I think we can rely on that baseline. In other words, once Parrot is up and running, we can assume that it has passed all of its tests. Would you be more comfortable with a pure-Parrot test suite? I don't think we're at that point of bootstrapping yet, but it would be nice to test other Parrot-enabled languages. -- c
